1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus and an image processing method for use in an image forming apparatus, such as a laser printer or a digital copying machine.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional image processing apparatus reduces a print area by executing processing to form a contour portion of an image and thin lines. When an image processed in this manner is printed in an image forming apparatus, the consumption of ink member such as toner can be reduced. Therefore, for the purpose of saving the toner, there has been developed a line thinning technique of, e.g., performing pattern replacement or determining a contour pixel as a sample point and forming the contour on the inner side by interpolation, but such a technique is mainly based on a character type document.
When this method is applied to a binary image in which characters and pictures obtained by binarizing a picture area by a gray level processing method such as an organizational dither both exist, a pseudo-contour or the like is generated since the contour of dots expressing a picture is cut off, thereby degrading the gray scale reproduction.